I really wanted to post this on [email protected] but I’m not trans myself and I didn’t want to take up their space.
Basically, the devs of Lemmy are looking to make upvotes public to everyone. Right now, I believe voter identities are known to server admins and mods.
I don’t have a strong opinion on this myself, either for or against, as I write this comment, but I’m wondering if there’s something I’m missing, frankly as a cishet dude.
But also… I’ve kinda lost trust in Nutomic making decisions about the software that won’t make things worse for trans people since his comments on the Olympics were made public. Dessalines has (so far) at least tolerated Nutomic’s transphobia despite whatever prior rhetoric. Frankly, I am suspicious that trans people don’t matter to the Lemmy dev team…to be charitable…so I’d really like to hear your thoughts.
The potential for drama is
Now when people get into a spat they will be able to compile a list of everyone who sides with their enemy or agrees with them
Personally, admin can already see votes if we need to purge reactionaries which is plenty of transparency as far as I’m concerned. Although imagining a big struggle session on here with public upvotes is very funny, I’ll admit
Me destroying someone’s tl;dr novela of a post with “[bad take] upvoter.”
Now when people get into a spat they will be able to compile a list of everyone who sides with their enemy or agrees with them
Awesome, dude. That sounds like totally normal and non-toxic behaviour. Terminally online people looking for new ways to be terminally online.
Exactly why changes to the design of the site shouldn’t encourage toxicity
the reality is people will just vote less and that’s fine.
RIP “food for thought” upvotes
if my upvote is perceived as a public co-sign, it’s gonna be a lot less common
Personally I don’t see an issue with that. Back in the old days most posts didn’t have likes.
Yup and that’s why I don’t upvote/down vote anything…I never developed the habit on old forums. Honestly wish we could go back to the old internet before likes. Too many people addicted to getting dopamine hits of digital approval.
Yeah, we used this to check for people mass down voting trans users and then banned them(then down votes was removed)
Personally? I don’t want it unless I can toggle a setting that makes my likes private. I don’t want to wake up to 50 messages because I liked something that I wasn’t supposed to because I was half asleep and didn’t know the entire post history of a user.
I shared a meme one time by a guy I didnt realize had a roman bust as an avatar and a buncha people called me a fascist. The internet is unforgiving!
I’m going to get roasted for forgetting to upbear the threads i post in
I already feel guilty when I don’t upbear someone I’m talking to and now I will feel even more pressure to do it to keep the tone friendly even if I don’t like their points.
as somebody who upbears everything they see before I even read it (and then removes it if I dislike what the person is saying) whenever I get into mini-debates on here and the other person doesn’t upbear my comment before replying, for about five seconds I perceive that as “fuck you, 72T.” before I then realize that many people are like you and just don’t upbear things that often.
I guess it’s just a holdover from reddit culture where you’ll see a comment thread 50 comments deep where both commenters have 0 votes on each comment because they’re both downvoting each other, and on here, not voting is the closest thing you have to a downvote
My position on removing our dislikes here on Hexbear was because of research papers showing it objectively caused negative outcomes.
I can’t find the paper for this but I am 100% certain that this topic has been researched and that I recall public “likes” were healthier for user behaviour while public dislikes caused major problems.
I would be for public upvotes, I would recommend removing downvotes entirely as per the research, but in lieu of that and because Lemmy’s mission is generally to be a reddit-clone I’d say keep the dislikes secret. Their existence is a negative to begin with, making them public is only going to spawn a huge number of confrontations as people confront the first person that downvoted them and demand a reason. It’ll be a mess.
My position remains with the research on these topics, the research is good, a huge number of people here poo-poo’d the idea of removing downvotes but came around, trust the research.
Pinging this thread @[email protected] way as you couldn’t pay me to make a github account just to say this.
Found the paper! Don’t fault you for not being able to find it, since the most obvious search keywords are generic and result in a bazillion unrelated studies–I just found it through your old comment:
How Community Feedback Shapes User Behavior (PDF link is in the right-hand menu)
Abstract:
Social media systems rely on user feedback and rating mechanisms for personalization, ranking, and content filtering. However, when users evaluate content contributed by fellow users (e.g., by liking a post or voting on a comment), these evaluations create complex social feedback effects. This paper investigates how ratings on a piece of content affect its author’s future behavior. By studying four large comment-based news communities, we find that negative feedback leads to significant behavioral changes that are detrimental to the community. Not only do authors of negatively-evaluated content contribute more, but also their future posts are of lower quality, and are perceived by the community as such. Moreover, these authors are more likely to subsequently evaluate their fellow users negatively, percolating these effects through the community. In contrast, positive feedback does not carry similar effects, and neither encourages rewarded authors to write more, nor improves the quality of their posts. Interestingly, the authors that receive no feedback are most likely to leave a community. Furthermore, a structural analysis of the voter network reveals that evaluations polarize the community the most when positive and negative votes are equally split.
Ahh that’s the paper on downvotes existing at all being a bad thing. I don’t recall whether public vs anonymous votes was in the same paper.
I don’t recall whether public vs anonymous votes was in the same paper.
Doesn’t seem to be–whoops! Better than nothing, I suppose
What does the research say about no votes? But with a bear that lights up when you click it
honestly this is the best outcome
Every time I see you pop up you’re writing incredibly sane things. You’re so much more polite and put so much effort into your comments compared to me (on all my accounts). I’m glad you’re contributing to the fediverse.
Also I agree and have seen similar things. Much as the orange hellsite is loathsome they do have better discussions than reddit (although they’re also largely populated by reactionaries, so you need to compare like with like). Removing downvotes was good, and I’m glad hexbear does.
I don’t think UIs should set expectations of privacy for users when something is public. And I don’t support information being available only to the motivated or technically capable as the first category is full of lunatics and the second is just technocratic elitism.
I can be a really aggressive asshole at times too! I am never that person if the other person is acting in good faith though, or unless someone needs a little slap on the wrist with a ruler in order to get them thinking/acting in a way that might be better.
And I don’t support information being available only to the motivated or technically capable as the first category is full of lunatics and the second is just technocratic elitism.
I worry that the internet rather than provide people with access to information is providing people with too much wrong information and has actually resulted in huge swathes of people being turned into piles of brainworms, porn addiction and neuroses the likes of which have never been seen before in history.
I worry that the internet rather than provide people with access to information is providing people with too much wrong information and has actually resulted in huge swathes of people being turned into piles of brainworms, porn addiction and neuroses the likes of which have never been seen before in history.
I am mixed on this, I feel kinda this way but also literally everyone ever has felt this about their time and new technologies or trends. There is evidence that some people appear to be harmed by the light boxes of dopamine but evidence for broad harms is much less good. I can imagine worlds in which the internet was better, but also ones in which it is much worse. When we do look at stuff like worsening mental health outcomes in younger people it’s a giant mess of correlated thing, from soc med to worsening economic outlook, climate disasters, reductions in freedom, reductions in physical activity, enclosure etc. To point the finger at any one and emphasise it feels reductive.
If we have reasons to believe that making a technology is harmful we should not do that, but if a technology is available gatekeeping it behind something unrelated to potential to be harmful (e.g. in the votes case the ability to spin up a server. There is no reason to believe this correlates with sound judgement about exposing yourself to the information) is at best patronising. Generally elites have a really terrible track record of making decisions for other people. So I think once the genie is out of the bottle, absent strong evidence to do so, we need to give people access to it.
Haven’t read the paper yet, but based on my personal experience in the barbaric wastelands of reddit and twitter I disagree. Imo the reason removing dislikes/downvotes works on hexbear is that you have strict rules and active/responsive mods that enforce them. I bet it takes a much higher than average (among lemmy communities) amount of work to build and maintain.
In places where that isn’t the case, downvotes are a decent stopgap for lazy mods.
I’m all for this.
Yes absolutely this needs to happen. This will be hugely helpful for establishing accountability for people who upvote awful posts.
Ngl sometimes I upvote stuff out of habit, I catch myself going back to a thread and realizing I upvoted some heinous stuff on accident lol
Yeah this happens. I treat upvotes like a “read” system. But I think there can be accounting for that in moderation decisions.
I catch myself doing this too
I honestly do this too (upvote almost everything, but I try to avoid anything that might be problematic) but I do think people would (hopefully) take into account accidents when looking at a user’s overall history.
That’s a good question, actually…. Are the visible upvotes per post or could you go to a persons account and view everything? I’d kind prefer the latter just to avoid jumping to conclusions if someone does accidentally upvote something bad.
This happens to me constantly on mobile because every app is really sensitive about left/right swiping. I could just turn gestures off but I’ll probably never vote on anything if I have to hold tap on something to open the menu and click the up arrow. So realistically I’m gonna catch some likes and bookmarks on some weird stuff.
Since the for comments are downthumbed and the against comments are upthumbed on the GitHub issue, anyone who feels this way should vote accordingly there (where your votes are also public).
Yes, anyone with a github account should do this.
This is definitely going to add to the mental health problems of the type of people who obsess about this shit.
Sounds like a big potential for harassment. The drama sounds fun, and so do the bits, but we already know that marginalized groups struggle with harassment on lemmy. I’d want to hear from people who are more knowledgable of how harassment works on lemmy or have experienced it to learn what their concerns are.
I think this would reduce it, at least in trans positive spaces. We could hunt down transphobes and ban them easier, which defederates their votes.
I agree. One of the issues in those spaces is the disproportionate effort it takes between being shit and cleaning up the shit. The more transparency you have, the easier it will be to moderate.
I’d like mods to be able to see it. If I imagine an interaction with a random user commenting on my upvotes, I can’t help but imagine this being the most tiring person in the world.
Admin can already see them
They’re probably saying tiring shit anyway about your comment history or w/e if they got to the point of trawling that.
Mods can see votes in a community they mod.
Though, I’m not sure hex bear interface can, since I have no button for it in the parenting comm.
Don’t give them any more power over us. We’re already weak enough as it is.
As well as being poor for opsec, without a very clear use case, I think this would just create more anxiety in people. I don’t see it making for a happier nicer community.
Broke: Making upvotes public so people are held accountable over what they upvote.
Woke: Taking away upvotes so people have to comment if they agree with a post.
What if we could avoid typing “+1” with upvotes? ;)
People have to like my posts enough to want to stamp their names publically by voting them? Gonna find out who’s brave enough to be seen upbearing autistic nerd shit.
Gonna find out who’s brave enough to be seen upbearing autistic nerd shit.
Lmao I didn’t think of that. Definitely need to find more people interested in my autistic nerd shit.
Works fine on Mastodon and Twitter. Turns out nobody cares. I will proudly like more autistic nerd shit than ever. Anyone who publicly polices this stuff without having botting to point to will look insane.
Works fine on Mastodon and Twitter
Can’t speak for Mastodon, but until recently on Twitter, when they hid all likes, it was the source of a lot of insane drama and “this you?” call out posts
Whatever you say Elon. I see who is afraid of the votes getting made public now in this thread 😂
This really should be the norm. If you look at old phpbb sites and the like generally when you “like” or “find a post helpful” or whatever they call it they will list the users who have liked a post.
This whole anonymous voting thing is again a redditism that lemmy devs need to break free from.
R*ddit was truly multiple steps backwards from phpBB forums.
im just praying for the day the lemmy devs decide to ditch the tree view and embrace chaos
I blame the tree view for the reason why Lemmy threads have performance issues relative to old school forum threads and why you can only see a max number of comments. There’s a max number of comments you can see per sorting, so by sorting new and old, you can see double the max number of comments, but there’s still a max number.
I mean phpbb threads are sorted by new and there’s usually also a limit to the number of posts you can see at a time. They’re both views into a database, lemmy just lets you sort the posts differently
Use chat mode
i think an old forum like is a bit different from how upvotes work. those were used more sparingly and carried more weight.
This whole
anonymousvoting thing is again a redditism that lemmy devs need to break free from.
I say Do it, when the admins here did it to ban all the transphobes a year ago it made the site way better, plus i dont think it will reduce votes.
What is the history here? Was this part of the great pronoun struggle session?
No, it was its own thing, the downvote struggle session https://hexbear.net/post/64691, i like to call it the great purge, but the timeline was first admins checked who was down voting trans posts then banned them, then removed downvotes
Was this before required pronouns or after required pronouns? It seems to me that Down Votes only really allow reactionaries to impose their perspective on a conversation without having their perspective ever directly challenged. In some ways, this reminds me of
’s notion of Capitalist Encirclement.In order for Hexbear to develop into a truly inclusive space, it does so under constant siege from the greater reactionary world. Reactionary forces inside Hexbear but also existing on the wider network use a wide range of attacks to stifle Hexbear’s development. Methods of moderation viewed as
or appealing to “populist ideals” by the reactionary must be employed to build a truly inclusive space. Invading the “privacy” of user’s votes to root out TURFS and then disable one of their primary modes of harassment only furthers the Hexbear project.This, I think, could be part of the objection to public votes. There are communities on this network that want nothing to do with the “Marketplace of Ideas” and that’s probably good to a greater degree. Allowing those communities to no longer be passively debated by reactionaries, by allowing the communities users to collectively identify downvote harassment, threatens the liberal notion of
.Since 1993 we’ve been trying to get over the horizon of Eternal September and onwards into Revolutionary October.
It was after the pronouns one because i remember comments being downvoted then, evidence
Ha! I can imagine this is what eventually led to disabling down votes. Each of these measures were definitely valid and justified looking back at them (as someone who wasn’t here when they happened).
If you want to publicly support a statement, that’s what comments are for. Upvotes are for privately agreeing with statements or marking them as read.
